obstruent voicing before sonorants. the case of west-flemish

this article reports on an acoustic study of voicing in obstruents followed by a sonorant across a word boundary in two dialects of dutch: east- and west-flemish. in both varieties only gradient phonetic voicing was typically found in word-final stops when a sonorant followed in the next word. in addition, west-flemish showed optional categorical voicing in word-final pre-sonorant fricatives. the voicing of fricatives is argued to be phonological, as it extends beyond the scope of automated coarticulation, and as the data pattern to form a distinct phonetic voicing target. however, the phonetic results do not support the hypothesis that west-flemish sonorants are laryngeally specified and thus able to spread voicing to neighbouring fricatives.